Why Good is Popular For Safe Mobile Computing

With the adoption of tablets and smartphones at work, a growing ecosystem of apps is improving productivity. But how can you make sure data stays secure? The government and many tech companies are using Good Technology to keep prying eyes from critical information. We caught up with Dimitri Volkmann, a vice president of Good Technology, after his panel at the CTIA conference in New Orleans, where he discussed how tablets are making their way into corporations and how they are being used.

Good Technology's apps have long been used for secure access to traditional functions such as email. In recent partnerships with Box and Quickoffice, employees now can use Good Technology to work on documents on their phones and tablets. Good's technology has many of the advantages of RIM's secure Blackberry cloud, but it works with other devices.

"What we have seen is an overall phenomenon of consumerization of IT. Consumerization of IT means two things. [The first is] bring your own devices--people acquire those devices or want to use those devices. And the second thing is the demand for apps. There are a lot of apps. [For instance], you can use apps for banking, so people are asking if there are similar applications that they can use for their work," Volkmann said. "Those apps started out as basic collaboration capabilities like email, contacts, calendar, and access to the intranet. Now we are seeing [apps made around sharing] documents, the ability to have documents on-the-go [so workers can] review and annotate them and send them back to the office. We see corporations are starting to build their own custom apps for their specific business processes. This allows them to drive better productivity from their workers because they have access to business processes on-the-go."

Here's how Good Technology works and how it provides security at the application level:

IT departments are embracing the BYOD movement. "The work anytime, anywhere anytime environment is really taking hold," said Mark Beaton, director of project management at Quickoffice."The main hurdles are that the technology has changed so fast, a lot of organizations weren't prepared for how quickly it has entered the organization. The rate of change is happening so quickly. [There are] so many new devices and so many apps coming out, [IT departments must ask], how do I put that out and still maintain a secure environment for my data?"